The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem

or is that the way it was found?” “Exactly the same, sir. No one touched it. The C.O. took a look at it when he got here with the doctor, but no one touched it.”
    “What about the canvas?”
    “The C.O. told us to cover it.”
    “Tell me, could anyone have gotten to it while you were on the road?”
    “No sir, impossible, the road is closed off.”
    “On this side. But what about from Hackey?”
    “We have a man on guard down there too, but you can’t see him from here because of the hill.”
    “What about the fields?”
    “It might be possible,” the policeman agreed, “but in that case he’d have to get across the water.”
    “Water? What water?”
    “There’s a stream on the other side of the road.”
    Gregory still hadn’t gone near the canvas. Moving carefully to the side, he looked for Williams’s footprints. He found a few on the narrow, well-trodden pathway encircling the nearest gravestones; they continued around the long shed, then went back into the shrubbery. Some big footprints like the ones he had seen on the road were clearly impressed in the snow at the spot where the constable had abandoned his post, suggesting that he had lost his way in the dark.
    Watch in hand, Gregory timed himself while making a complete circuit around the shed: four minutes. “At night, during the snow storm, it might have been twice as much,” he thought, “and maybe two minutes more, give or take, for the fog.” Venturing deeper into the thick shrubbery, Gregory found himself walking down a slope. Suddenly, the snow slid out from under him. Grabbing some hazelwood branches he managed to stop himself just before he fell into the stream. The area in which he regained his footing was the lowest point in the syncline in which the cemetery was situated. Even close up it was hard to see the stream because of the high snow drifts along its banks. Here and there he noted the water fretting steadily at the eroded roots of nearby shrubs; embedded in the soft loam at the bottom of the stream he could see stone fragments, some of them similar in size and shape to paving blocks. Turning around, Gregory had a better view than before of the mortuary’s rear wall, but only of the windowless upper portion which loomed over the bushes a few yards away. He took a good look; then, pushing the resilient hazel branches out of his way, began to climb back.
    “Where can I find the local stonemason?” he asked the constable. The officer understood immediately.
    “He lives near the road, a little way past the bridge. The first house over there, it’s a kind of yellowish color. He only does stone work in the summertime; winters he takes on carpentry to make a little extra.”
    “How does he get his stones over here? By the road?”
    “He brings them in on the road when the water is low, but when it’s high enough, which only happens once in a while, he floats them over from the station by raft. He enjoys doing that kind of thing.”
    “Once he gets them here, where does he work on them—over there near the stream?”
    “Sometimes, but not always. He works in a lot of different places.”
    “If you follow the stream from here, does it lead up to the station?”
    “Yes, but you can’t really go that way because the whole area is tangled with underbrush right up to the edge of the water.”
    Gregory walked over to the side wall of the mortuary. One of the windows was open—in fact, it was broken, and a jagged piece of the glass pane was half-buried in the snow just beneath it. He peeked inside, but it was so dark that he couldn’t see anything.
    “Did anyone go inside?”
    “Only the C.O., sir.”
    “Not the doctor?”
    “No, the doctor didn’t go in.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “Adams, sir. We didn’t know when the ambulance from London would get here. The one from Hackey got here first, and Dr. Adams came along with it. He happened to be on night duty when the call came in.”
    “Is that so?” said Gregory,